Assignment #7 "Work"

Work

First/Worst/Best Jobs

First Job: JP Morgan

My career in wage slavery begins when I was about 16 and still clueless about life. I was attending High School in Brooklyn half heartedly (going to class when I wanted to) but still getting good enough grades, “Good enough grades for what?” I said to myself. What did I want to do with my life? I didn’t have much respect for school at the time, how could I when I was coasting and still doing well? This is the point when I heard about the co-op program at my High School.

It was perfect, in this program you go to school one week then to work the other week, so if you got bored with either work or school one week the next week would be totally different. This program was seemingly made for people with attention deficit disorder, which nowadays all 16 year olds have. The most important part of this program however was the training the school helped give the student in resume building, interviewing skills and your basic office manners. I did so well in these areas that I was selected to go on an interview for JP Morgan. Though most of what I did at JP Morgan was basic data entry, I did acquire many skills with my first foray into the corporate world. I guess one of those skills was living on $6.50 an hour.

Worst Job: SK Hand Tool

There are many attributes that can make a job qualify as being a bad job or even the worst job. Most people, if not all people, have had at least one experience with a job that had one of the following problems: Adverse work environment, unfriendly boss and/or co workers and a long commute. I had the misfortune of having a job that had all the above attributes and then some.

The setting was Chicago in the dead of winter in 1998. I had been floating from job to job and by some perverse force of nature I found an ad for SK hand tool. After I finished the interview with the boss at SK I figured this would be as good a job as any that I could find at the moment and as an added plus my girlfriend at the time worked just down the road and got off at around the same time so I can catch a ride home everyday. Getting to work was a whole other issue.

My day started at about five in the morning with the worst of all sounds, the alarm clock (may God banish the inventor of this wretched device to hell for all eternity). After preparing myself for the wee hours of a Chicagoan winter day, I walked off to the bus stop. There wasn’t a train close by so I had to take part in the game that many people play in Chicagoland during the winter: practice not getting frostbite until the people’s chariot arrived, the bus.

After about an hour of traveling by bus and train I get to SK hand tool. First thing I notice is that all my new co workers are about fifty years old and look like they have worked a combined thousand years in that factory. Yet for some reason they maintain some semblance of happiness as they talk to each other. Perhaps it is because the subject of conversation is how many hookers they are going to get come payday, who knows? Nice guys though, one of them thinks my last name is my first name and calls me Fritz.

When I was first hired I was told to bring a change of clothes and a lock for my locker. The boss said that the work area gets a little oily and dirty so I might want to bring an extra set of clothes. There has never been such an understatement in history. There is not one square inch of surface area in the factory that has not been bathed in oil (this was also the case for the workers there as well). For the 2 months I was there I never got used to the slipping and sliding. The act of going to the restroom or lunchroom was like an Olympic event.

According to my boss my job was pretty easy. He showed me to my workstation which consisted of a machine that punched holes into metal (or fingers if you weren’t fast enough), a giant box of small metal pieces and another box on the opposite side that was empty. I was to grab one of the pieces in the box with my right hand, then adjust this piece in the hole puncher with both hands, then after my hands were clear step on a pedal on the floor that would trigger the machine to punch the metal piece. I was to then dump the finished pieces into the empty box. As he went on at a leisurely pace how my job was to be done, I noticed there was a counter on the machine. When I asked him about this he told me not to worry about the counter for now, he then informed me when I was more comfortable with the machine I could go much faster. Yippie, I thought.

I stepped up to the machine and copied what my boss just did and voila, I had done the same as him! I was ecstatic because I have always been a slow learner at manual labor jobs. I thought, no sweat, I can get used to this, so I went on merrily with my job. I was at it for an hour when a lady went to the box that was once empty and now slowly filling up. I stopped working, curious to the fact that one: there was a woman in the factory and two, what the hell was she doing? She then glanced over to me and informed me that she was quality control and she was checking my work. She came over to me every hour and every hour she just walked away not telling me if I was doing well or not.

As this went on and the counter reached 300 or so I started to feel the wear and tear. My shoulders were already feeling rather tired and it wasn’t even lunchtime, I’ll get used to it I kept telling myself. I never did, how could I ever get used to moving in the same manner hundreds of times a day every day for ten dollars an hour? I started to think of ways to find refuge; I thought the bathroom was the perfect place. Its relative quite was soothing, all those machines clanging all day long was driving me crazy. The only thing bad about the bathroom was that it was almost as cold in there was it was at my workstation, or as a matter of fact in the whole factory. Even with me moving all day long I could not maintain a sweat. If it was thirty degrees outside then it was thirty five inside. When I brought this up to my co workers they laughed and informed me that in the summer it gets so hot inside that management provides the workers with salt tablets so they won’t pass out due to them sweating so much. It was then that I knew I was in hell, it’s as if whoever designed this place wanted to assault every human sense. This should have been my cue to exit, but for some reason unbeknownst to me I kept going.

I started to go to the bathroom every ten minutes or so just to get away. I knew I was going to get a talking to from a supervisor if I kept on but the few minutes in the bathroom was the only thing that kept me going. Mercifully I was fired for going to my place of refuge too much, and initially I was mad, I told them that I could have a health problem that they don’t know about and that I should have medical insurance so I can find out what was wrong with me. Which was true, they should have had a health plan. Maybe I could have gone to a shrink and found out why I stayed there so long.

In the SK hand tool brochure it says they make “Quality American made tools for the American working man” or some gibberish. The only thing it made for me was misery.

Best Job

By far my favorite job was working for the “Nobody beats the Wiz” record store chain. I started working there right after my internship at JP Morgan ended. JP had wanted me back full time but I couldn’t be bothered working on Wall Street at such an early age.

I always have loved music and now I had the chance to acquire some knowledge of music as well. Looking back at my days at the Wiz however I feel grief as well. This was where I met my best friend Dan Stokes who funny enough was my manager when I first met him. Dan died a few years back of cancer at the age of 35 but the few years that I did work with him were eventful.

When we met up at The Wiz we immediately bonded, we liked the same music and had similar politics. As we were helping customers and suggesting that if they like Madonna’s new album they should check out the new Ace of Base (on sale for only $12.98!), we laughed at them and their poor taste in muzak. We would talk about everything from which new Punk bands were still good, to questioning if the hundred dollar Coltrane collection was worth it (it certainly was).

We went on and formed a band and would tell the kids who would come in and buy the new Green Day or Ramones album to check our band out. Not that we sounded like either of those bands but that was the closest the Wiz got to what we sounded like. The store, being in Greenwich Village was also a great place to meet people from all over the world, especially during the warmer months there were tons of tourists around. The German tourists would always buy hundreds of dollars worth of CDs of every genre possible. The French girls would come in and model Parisian summer fashions for us.

From meeting my best friend and forming a band, then promoting that band, to running into a global array of people the Wiz was a great working experience and one I will never forget, even though they paid me eight bucks an hour.